(Ed note: This is the first of a two-part essay by Laurence Goldstein. Laurence Goldstein is Professor of English at the University
of Michigan and Editor Emeritus of Michigan
Quarterly Review (1977-2009). His
most recent book is a volume of poems, A
Room in California (Northwestern University Press, 2005). A book of literary criticism, Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the City’s Essential Poems, is
forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.)
B. F. Skinner (c) 1971
MEETING B. F. SKINNER, 1963
“Wear a coat and tie, if you have them,”
my editor advised. “He’s pretty famous.”
I folded my father’s formal jacket
over my sport shirt and peggers, and strolled
across the wide piazza toward Royce Hall.
Humming step by nervous step, in a
cascade of arias from the auditorium,
I mounted many stairs to an airless room.
He wore a coat and tie, of course: Harvard
spiffed-up for UCLA, noblesse oblige.
We both sweated a little. This interview,
we understood, was one building block
in my enlightenment, like the class hour
just past, on Wordsworth or Milton, spirits
most antithetical to L.A. “I hope I don’t
bore you,” I offered. “I’m never bored,” he said,
“Tired sometimes, but never bored.” I tried
to keep it andante, but he had foresuffered
all my queries on free will and social control.
If this were sport fencing, I died in five minutes.
I flourished a final thrust: “You write in Walden Two
that this utopia knows no unhappiness,
thanks to the Planners’ perfect design. Yet
the citizens rehearse a production of Hedda Gabler.
How can that be? How would they understand
so much heartbreak?” He gazed downward;
I felt my education hang in the scales of logic.
Finally, diminuendo, his small defeated voice:
“You’re right. The young wouldn’t understand.
I must change the play in the next edition.”
I felt sorry for him, for my own petty
triumph, my cub mousetrap cunningly sprung.
Skinner didn’t correct the next edition.
So what? Walden Two lost its audience.
The late Sixties made any bossy republic
Seem an affront to the young libido. A discord.
Only the spot of time seems unshakeable,
the invulnerable memory, those few minutes
atop the concert hall, my heart pounding
and the axis of culture shifting, adagio.
“Meeting B. F. Skinner, 1963” was written to mark the semi-centennial
of a half hour’s encounter between a UCLA undergraduate, myself, and a
distinguished scientist-philosopher visiting the campus to deliver a guest
lecture. In the early 1960s I imagined that
my destiny lay in journalism, and as an eager junior reporter for The Daily Bruin I volunteered to
interview B. F. Skinner, who generously made himself available for a
conversation he probably assumed would be a waste of his valuable time. The poem preserves the few remarks I can
remember and tries to recreate the feel
of an event which turned out to be more long-lasting in my memory than my
exchanges during those years with other visitors to campus as well as figures
residing in Los Angeles: John F.
Kennedy, John Dos Passos, Stan Laurel, Dorothy Parker, Christopher Isherwood,
Aldous Huxley.
At the same time I
settled into the romance of journalism—I cherished the old saw that this poorly
paid profession was highly desirable because “you meet such interesting
people”—I became increasingly fascinated by serious literature, especially
poetry. The two worlds meshed for me;
both demanded intellectual curiosity, stamina, and high-end verbal skills. The eight-paragraph news items and book
reviews I wrote for the Bruin
corresponded to the eight-line stanza poems, often of eight stanzas, I turned
out as exercises in verse composition.
Sometimes those poems had the form of a meeting, an interview, a
narrative of significant contact between two people. Sometimes I still write those same kind of
poems. Inevitably I have formulated a
few rules governing the encounter poem.
1) For maximum effect, the narrative must
dramatize a meeting between two people that is clearly a one-off, a nonce occurrence. These two people will never meet again, and
that fact is understood by both parties.
The unrepeatable quality of their encounter intensifies their emotional
and intellectual exchange. Love poems do
not belong in this category, nor poems of family and long friendship.
2) There is an imbalance, a fundamental
incongruity, in their status. The
speaker is likely to be the younger person, more a listener and learner taking
mental notes. It is he or she who
registers the impact of contact with a person likely to be somewhat exotic,
exceptional, troubling, capable of surprising statements. The speaker is almost always impressed by the
strangeness of the other’s
presence. The best poems in this mode
have that Pip-meets-Miss Havisham affect.
3) To say as much is to indicate the closeness
of the genre to fiction and drama as models.
The encounter poem treats scenes in ways familiar to all consumers of
literature, film scripts, and popular songs.
It is intertextual to a high degree, its practices open to introjection
from a variety of familiar and recondite sources. The encounter poem sounds like a scene in a
novel or a condensed short story. A
certain moral weight attaches to the encounter poem because of its deliberate
situation in the literary mainstream.
Rules for social conduct are right on the surface.
4) There must be some dialogue to fulfill the
above-mentioned dialogic structure of the dramatic lyric, though the speaker
may prefer to direct his part of the conversation to the reader in the form of
a meditative aside. Meetings with
non-human creatures may have some of the same conventions as the encounter poem
but their rhetorical strategies differ from this person-with-person mode. The epiphanies that belong to poems of
contact with birds, fish, moose, skunks, groundhogs, bears, deer, dogs and cats
(readers can supply some famous examples) differ from the turns and intentions
of the interpersonal poem.
5). Likewise the allegorical conjunction of one
human and one spirit figure do not qualify.
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is one of the great ballads of the English
language, but it does not advance by exchange of dialogue. The demon lover sings, sighs, and moans; she
does not speak beyond her false declaration, “I love thee true.” (Nor does the “glimmering girl” in Yeats’s “The
Song of Wandering Aengus” who calls her victim’s name but disappears before she
can establish herself as anything other than an archetype.) I would make an exception of some special
cases like T. S. Eliot’s encounter with the “familiar compound ghost” in
“Little Gidding” and the dialogue of the two dead soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s
“Strange Meeting.” Probably it is Owen’s
death in war that makes us subconsciously hear the “I” of the poem as the
posthumous voice of the poet. Dialogues
with God do not qualify for this category (sorry, George Herbert!) but because
the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons, a conversation with,
say, Koch Industries, is allowable.
6). The fact that the speaker has written a poem
to document the encounter becomes an important motif, either explicitly or
implicitly. The artifact brings news
about how knowledge and power got transmitted to the talented speaker. “Something for your poetry, no?” says the Colonel
as he pours a sack of human ears onto the table to intimidate the poet-journalist
who is dining with him. Precisely. Carolyn Forché’s prose poem enacts the shift of
power between them after their encounter, when her world-famous text mortifies
his bullying performance.
These references to
Miss Havisham, the Colonel, the Beautiful Woman Without Mercy, might suggest
that the encounters that most interest me take the structure of a contest
between Good and Evil; that the poet always portrays the Other as an antagonist
to be overcome, not as an agent of personal development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not even in my own poem about B. F. Skinner,
whose brave acknowledgment of an error in his most famous book continues to
inspire me fifty years later. The more
complex the duality of values in the poem, the better chance it has to provoke
and intrigue the reader and call him or her back to repeated readings.
I want to call attention to two masterpieces
of the genre. The first is the encounter
of William Wordsworth, or “William Wordsworth,” and the Leech Gatherer in the
poem “Resolution and Independence.” I
put the author’s name in quotation marks because the poem is not a fully
accurate account of their meeting on the moors; we have Dorothy Wordsworth’s
journal entry of 3 October 1800 to remind us that this most sincere of all
poets did not hesitate to recast his experience into a more perfect artistic
form for his readers’ benefit. He was an
artificer and sought a truth-to-life beyond the constraints of exact
transcription.
Manipulation of
details can be expected from a poem with such an overt therapeutic
purpose. We know from biographical
materials that this poem of 1802 is Wordsworth’s response to his friend
Coleridge’s professions in person and in writing of his suffocating experiences
of dejection. Wordsworth, also a prey to
melancholy even in the happiest times of his life, harked back to an encounter
two years previous and impersonated the malady he shared with his fellow poet. The first-person plural in the poem’s most
famous couplet is no accident: “We Poets
in our youth begin in gladness, / But thereof come in the end despondency and
madness.” In no way does this
biographical context impair the poem; quite the contrary. The formal question and answer structure,
rendered in rhyme royal, sustains the dignity of a colloquy that might have
become maudlin in the hands of a lesser poet.
The Leech Gatherer
(the poem’s original title) seems at first to be the subordinate figure of the
duo: “His body was bent double, feet and
head / Coming together in life’s pilgrimage.”
Add to his physical debility the fact that the leeches upon whose sale his
survival depends have diminished in number over the years. Poor and exhausted, he is obviously close to
death by natural causes. And yet this
pathetic creature is full of good cheer, fortitude, and trust in his
Creator. The speaker elicits the facts
of the matter by repeated questions and remarks, during which time we as
readers stand in awe of how the Leech Gatherer’s “discourse . . . // Cheerfully
uttered, with demeanor kind” rebukes the poet’s anxiety and self-pity. That transmission of spiritual power
complicates the narrative by means of a confusion of understanding as to just
who is more or less fortunate, more glad and grateful to be alive. This confusion nourishes the paradox of the
poem’s presence in our lives. The Leech Gatherer
continues to be a consolatory figure for readers who may enjoy comfortable
circumstances outwardly but suffer bouts of melancholy within. Paul Goodman wrote that he could not read the
poem without weeping. (Lewis Carroll,
who skewered it in a parody, apparently could not read it without laughing.) It remains an encounter poem we read
throughout our life with mixed and deep feelings.
Compared to all the
hundreds (thousands?) of commentaries Wordsworth’s poem has garnered, it is
astonishing to me that a poem close to it in quality has received no lengthy
readings at all (I hope to be corrected on this point). I refer to Robert Hayden’s “Aunt Jemima of
the Ocean Waves” from his volume of 1970, Words
in the Mourning Time, and reprinted in his Collected Poems. In Part I
of this dramatic lyric the speaker wanders by a seaside minstrel/freak show
featuring performers doing various sketches of a humiliating kind. “Poor devils have to live somehow,” he
remarks to himself in a one-line stanza.
Obviously dejected, he sits by the shore, and then in Part II he is
joined by the woman who performs the role of Aunt Jemima, “fake mammy to God’s
mistakes,” as she wisecracks. But like
the Leech Gatherer she is full of good spirit and fills the rest of the poem
with vivid autobiographical musings.
The speaker does not address her at all,
making this poem a notable variation on the customary dialogue structure. (Forché directs no quoted speech to the
Colonel either.) But we do hear his
silent response, his meditation, or rather overhear
it in the mode famously described by John Stuart Mill. Compared to Aunt Jemima’s fluent, idiomatic
wit, his reactions, seemingly addressed as an aside to the reader, remain
elevated in diction, professorial in allusion, and complex in syntax. What seems a mental withdrawal from interaction
with his companion can also be read as an effort to translate the picaresque
narrative of her life into high-culture literary language:
Scream of children in the surf,
adagios of sun and flashing foam,
the sexual glitter, oppressive fun. . .
an antique etching comes to mind:
“The Sable Venus” naked on
a baroque Cellini shell—voluptuous
imago floating in the wake
of slave-ships on fantastic seas.*
I’ve never been quite sure how to read this silent rejoinder
to her discourse. He has acknowledged in
Part I that he is a “confederate” of the minstrel show figures like Aunt Jemima
and “Kokimo the Dixie Dancing Fool.” He
too is black-skinned with a talent for self-invention. Is he evading the embarrassing implications
of her demeaning self-portrait, as if turning away in shame from what she
confesses is a degrading life of role-playing and deception? (She could be making it all up.) Or does he honor her by interpreting her
adventurous life history as a high Romantic life-journey? In either case he has clearly retreated to the
honorable role of Poet, master of language, inviting the reader’s admiration
for his elevated rhetoric but covertly yielding the stage to her superior
verbal skills. The last stanza is her
unwitting rebuke of his quality reverie:
Jemima
sighs. Reckon I’d best
be getting back. I help her up.
Don't take no wooden nickels, hear?
Tin dimes neither. So long, pal.
It’s too late for this advice, we think. His somewhat strained language—a deliberate
risk on Hayden’s part—is precisely the stuff of legend and tradition that
separates her low raffish idioms from his high eloquence and keeps her fixed in
her lowly role as Aunt Jemima.
The poem is more
complex than my few comments can begin to describe. By bringing these two figures into
conjunction--alike in race, unlike in education and life experience--it
challenges our good intentions of reading the plot in a straightforward, politically
correct manner. The nervous speaker is
too erudite to carry on a companionable conversation, and how strange that seems, to us as to him. The encounter is a dramatic and linguistic
impasse, a stand-off of verbal styles.
What gets transmitted to us is the same failure of class solidarity we
glimpse in Wordsworth’s poem, but made more unsettling and ambiguous by the
modernist manner of its clashing frames.
This dissonant duet—she speaking to him, he speaking in monologue form
to the reader—enlarges the genre of the encounter poem as befits a major poet.
If the alien figure
of the Leech Gatherer looks forward in obvious ways to Aunt Jemima, he
anticipates even more obviously Robert Frost’s haunting narrative, “Two Tramps
in Mud Time,” the quintessential Great Depression poem, in which an encounter
occurs between the backwoods speaker (one has to grit one’s teeth not to type
the words “Robert Frost”) who is chopping wood and two lumberjacks, though only
one of them approaches the wary speaker and yells “Hit them hard!” (He is given no further speech.) By approaching closer to the chopping block,
he makes clear his desire to usurp for pay the speaker’s satisfying task of
preparing firewood for the cold season.
Like the single utterance of La Belle Dame in Keats’s poem, these three
words fix the “hulking” stranger as an archetype, in this case of the dangerous
woods from which he emerges. Giving him
no further speech is a mistake, I think.
Frost’s long monologue in response can’t help but reduce the tramp to a
prop, a poor occasion for the poet’s self-congratulating sermon about the
proper way to behave “For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”
One final note. When we consider the figures of the Leech Gatherer
and Aunt Jemima—neither is granted a personal name in the poems—we face the
inescapable problem of whether to identify them as “doubles” for the poet in
the manner Freud defines this elusive concept in his essay on “The
Uncanny.” Encounter poems often do
introduce a dyad in which one figure seems to represent the daimon of the
other. Their dialogue enacts the psychic
tensions felt by the speaker, who may or may not be trying to exorcise the
mysterious personality spun off as a sibling or parent from his unconscious. When I wrote my poem on B. F. Skinner I
intended it as an homage. Skinner first
took shape as a patriarchal voice of rectitude in the music of time. But in reviewing the manuscript drafts I see
how inevitably Skinner emerges as a venerable icon that the speaker treats
irreverently. He and his utopian book
are an affront to the twenty-year-old, fated to be an academic scholar as well,
who confronts the master and uses the poem as a way to undermine him, if not to
slay him in the Oedipal paradigm. Is
there a more forgiving poem about B. F. Skinner out there? I sincerely hope so.
- The painting Hayden’s speaker has in mind can be
seen by searching “The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West
Indies.”
